subject: A Guide To Writing A Biography or Memoir or Family History [print this page] A Guide To Writing A Biography or Memoir or Family History
The first and foremost duty and responsibility of a biographer or memoir writer the duty and responsibility which comprehends all others, is reliability and justice. You should reproduce the life of your subject itself, making it live again in your representation. Your highest and only good or aim should be, like a witness, to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, and like a judge, to do full justice to every person and event which comes under his or her review.
Writing a biography or memoir is art. The biographer or memoir writer must not present facts, but re-present them. First she or he must digest the facts with intensity and then seek a perspective on which to represent the facts. The life of someone you are writing about is not a hip of skeletons, but a delicate complex structure. By all means try striving for brevity in re-presenting facts. There is no use in writing books unless they are read. But who has time in this busy age to weary through the volumes of raw data. True, the reader of biography should not get miniature pictures, but full comprehensive portraits. Unfortunately most biographers represent their subject's lives as a dead corpse rather than a living and working power abiding interest.
You must lay aside all prejudice and party zeal, and proceed in the pure love of truth. Not that you must become a tabular rasa [Latin phrase meaning "clean slate" that is a mind free of misconceptions or previous notions]. No man or woman should attempt, to cast off the life influences which made us what we are individually. But you must in everything be as true as possible to the objective fact, "sine ira et studio"[ Latin meaning "without anger and fondness" or "without hate and zealousness"] do justice to every person and event where the you see all points in the circumference.
Further you should aim then to reproduce both the unity and the variety of the life under consideration, re-presenting the different topics in their separate completeness, without overlooking their organic wholeness and connection. The composition or re-presentation of facts should not be arbitrarily made, and then pedantically applied. You should keep the balance and seek perspective in composition.
Even error can only be seen from the position of truth "verum est index sui et falsi" [sticking with the truth reveals falsehood].
Above all, and all things being equal, being objective does not remove the fact that, in composing the facts and putting them into perspectives you should be in thorough sympathy with your subject, and enthusiastically be devoted thereto. Just like no one can interpret a poet without poetic feeling and taste.
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